St Patrick’s Day

Seeing as I couldn’t make it up to visit my family on Saturday because of the rugby, I stayed in Notts for an extra day to split up the journey and worked from home. My Dad treated me to some of his leftover homemade steak pie for dinner and I ate it with some beans as a quick side. It was delicious! You really can’t get better than homemade pie!

Here’s the recipe:

Chop 2 onions and cut 400g casserole steak into chunks. Mix in a bowl, pour over some beer and marinate for at least 2 hours. Once marinated, add to a pan and cook on the hob with some diced carrots, broccoli/cauliflower, salt and pepper and a beef stock cube for more flavour, for 4 hours. Preheat the oven to 190°C. Grease a pie dish and then roll some shortcrust pastry into the dish. Trim and re-roll the pastry for a top crust. Spoon the filling into the pie crust, leaving as much liquid behind as possible. Thicken the liquid and then spoon it over the pie filling. Add the pastry top to the pie, seal and pierce it. Bake the pie for 45 minutes. Serve with mash and extra gravy.

I was craving some pasta after a busy Monday and managed to find this really simple but tasty recipe online. A great outcome from this project is finding new pasta combinations that take sub 30 minutes all in. This dish had some great ingredients which all complimented each other nicely. The sultanas and capers in particular worked well. I’ll definitely be having this again for a few lunches throughout the year.

17/03/2015: Corned beef on potato farls – own recipe

Today was St Patrick’s Day so we tried to find something quintessentially Irish to eat. Most of the recipes that I could find when I searched for “traditional Irish food” contained one or more of potato, cabbage, and corned beef. I’m a big fan of potato farls so I figured we could have corned beef on potato farls topped with a poached egg and served with a side of cabbage. Of course we also had Guinness! I wasn’t totally bowled over by this and although it was easy enough to make and didn’t taste awful, I probably won’t make it again.

18/03/2015: Tuna and anchovy salad – own recipe

This is a good old staple of ours and was one of the reasons we decided to do this project because we were making it all the time! Anchovies are packed full of goodness but, as far as I’m concerned, taste pretty awful especially if they’ve come out of a tin. YUK so salty! So I decided one time to chop them up and stir them into tuna to try and disguise them! It works pretty well and great served on top of a bowl of nice yummy salad and with a boiled egg on the side.

This is another dish that I had for lunch at some point during my trip to Japan. It’s a very simple and tasty dish especially if you just want to stick to one type of noodle and one dipping sauce. I went for the whole lot because it feels like a special treat. I cooked up some udon noodles, soba noodles, and green tea soba noodles. The soy dipping sauce for the soba noodles is made with soy, dashi, sake, a bit of sugar, and some chopped spring onions, and the sesame dipping sauce for the udon noodles is one that I bought from the Japan Centre and diluted with a bit of water.

Mark’s mum introduced us to this little farm shop just outside of Wantage and now we try to visit for brunch whenever we’re in the area. When you get out of the car you’re first greeted by the chickens wandering about. Then you go through into a porch full of local vegetables, and then you’re into the main part of the farm shop with meat and dairy goods to one side, and other food goods such as jams etc to the other side. Then at the back you can sit and order delicious handmade and locally sourced food with a breath-taking view over the neighbouring fields. Last time we visited we bought a couple of their frozen pies to take home and this one was the last of that batch. I think things probably taste better when you know that the ingredients are local and you’re supported a great little business, but these pies are so delicious that they don’t need the extra help! I highly recommend this little farm shop if you’re ever even vaguely near the area.

One lovely and unexpected result of doing this project is that people have taken to giving us little foody treats whenever they see something a bit different or quirky. A couple of really good friends of ours came to stay and gave us a little jar of tom yum paste as a little thank you and a helping hand to our project. The jar had a recipe for tom yum soup so we figured that was the way we would go and I personally had never tried it before. I can’t believe I’ve been missing out all this time! It’s so delicious and so easy to make! Definitely a new weeknight-dinner staple.
Here’s a link to another tom yum soup recipe using this paste: http://realfood.tesco.com/recipes/tom-yum-soup.html